1. Technical Field
The present teaching relates to methods, systems, and programming for entity linking and utilization thereof.
2. Discussion of Technical Background
Commercial web search engines are presenting increasingly advanced results that include rich displays of answers, facts, entities, and other structured results such as ratings and prices. These richer user experiences are centered around understanding and displaying information around entities presented in web search queries. More and more, users want to find the actual answers and/or entities that satisfy their information need, rather than merely the documents that mention them. One step in this process is to understand which entities are mentioned in the query in order for the search engine to be able to fire actions that involve the entities and query intents. This entity linking (also known as disambiguation) has to be performed within a very limited time budget, as it needs to happen before the actual search process commences.
None of the existing entity linking approaches deals with the problem of linking entities in the shortest amount of time possible, nor they introduce richer semantic contexts. Most existing entity linking approaches assume that the input text is relatively clean and grammatically correct and that it provides sufficient context for the purposes of identifying entities. Queries, on the other hand, are short, noisy, and full of shorthand and other ungrammatical text, and provide very limited context for the words they contain. Hence, known entity detection approached designed for news articles or web pages do not perform well on short text strings, e.g., queries. On the other hand, the efficiency aspect of current entity linking systems has not been evaluated so far on a large corpus of queries. Entity linking in queries poses some technical challenges, because of the sheer volume of the data, its dynamic nature, the creative language usage, and the required tradeoff between speed and disambiguation quality.
Therefore, there is a need to provide an improved solution for entity linking to solve the above-mentioned problems.